


Khlōros

by kirakirababy



Category: SCREW (Band), the GazettE
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Dark, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Manipulation, Gay, Gay Sex, M/M, Minor Violence, Multiple Pairings, Mythology References, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 13:22:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4626795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirakirababy/pseuds/kirakirababy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You've got a mind like a cemetery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Khlōros

_You've got a mind like a cemetery; where turning corpses twist and rot like a shipwreck reaching up from the deep._  
_A systematic array of brittle bodies and beautiful faces_  
 _squalid and sweetly haggard_  
 _with tight tendons and fluttering hearts and bloody lips._  
 _All dead from head to toe._  
  
“Aoi. Open the fucking door.”  
Sweat and sex and something that reminded me vaguely of the violets that grew on the shady side of my apartment building wafted out with you as you cracked the door open and stepped into the hall. “What are you doing here?” You tipped a can of beer to your lips, glancing back into the darkened apartment and quirking an eyebrow in a perfunctory sort of way  
“Go ahead. Open it.”  
You looked back at me with a defiant smile and let the door swing open a few inches.  
The TV talked in electric tones and the girl, illuminated on the couch, managed to look only mildly surprised. Vermilion veins painted her cheeks and nose a dusty pink and I imagined her dead. Milk-white maggots writhed in her stone-shuttered, mascara-smudged eyes. Her parted purple lips formed a loose ‘O’ as she shifted, pulling her disheveled braid over her shoulder and reaching to the floor for a fallen hair tie. “Hey..I should go,” she murmured, rising unsteadily to her feet.  
“You don’t have to go just because he showed up.”  
She didn’t answer, simply shook her head as she tugged her tawdry t-shirt over her shoulders and pulled up her jeans, slipping awkwardly past and into the hallway with her heels in her hands.  
The delicate snap of her bare feet on wood made me think of flesh flushed with pumping blood, and then of a quiet carcass, blue-grey and puffy being slowly swallowed by the sea.  
“By all means, sweetheart, don’t leave on my account.”  
  
_I knew that you knew the feeling. Because we’d talked about it before._  
_Somehow, we managed to speak like we were still alive,_  
 _while we sensed we were dead already,_  
 _and the ground opened up so we climbed inside willingly._  
 _We acted as if in the darkness,_  
 _we could no longer see the fuzzy outline of what we had done,_  
 _and fooled ourselves into thinking the past wouldn’t haunt us anymore._  
 _But swimming in shadows, caught in the crosscurrent, we struggled for air._  
 _As the cattails sliced our skin and the sedges burnt our knees,_  
 _you would promise me spring_  
 _and I would call you a liar._  
  
The jangly cadence of your cell phone had me reaching blindly for the bedside table.  
“Hello?”  
A man's honeyed voice dripped thickly through the receiver, asking for you somewhat impatiently.  
When I responded that you had stepped out, the viscous voice burst into breathy laughter and, without saying goodbye, hung up.  
The cicadas were gossiping and you wearing nothing but a pair of loose sweatpants still warm from drying in the summer sun, the fabric hanging low off sharp hips.  
I ran a finger up your protruding, sweat-damp spine, imagined black flies congregating in ridges of flesh and bone, and smiled when you swore and jumped in your skin.  
We both leaned against the railing of the balcony and watched as your cigarette butt fell from your listless fingers, tumbling to the sidewalk below.  
“Hey.” I pressed your phone into your open hand and accepted the cigarette you offered from the pack on the table, cold fingertips glued firmly to lips. “You missed a call.”  
“Who was it?”  
“How would I know.”  
“You didn’t answer?”  
“I did, but your bitch has bad manners.”  
“Uru--”  
“Do you think I’m stupid?”  
After that, we spoke too loudly and too much  
and when you finally found your sunglasses, a split lip, and the door handle, your departure was staggeringly definitive.  
  
_Crushed in the corridor_  
_we pretended the weight on our eyelids_  
 _was nothing more than smeared charcoal and flakes of shimmering mica._  
 _Even though we could barely blink_  
 _for the heaviness of silver coin dressings._  
 _Caught in cold fetters we shotgun smoked,_  
 _and breathed like ghosts._  
  
Every shaking inhale of menthol smoke and thick summer air felt like a lung full of earth-worm ridden soil and gravel, scratchy and irritating to a throat already sore with tension.  
I forced a smile when you tumbled out into the night beside me and crossed my arms over my chest, “Don’t touch me,” Lazarus of Bethany.  
You wound yourself around my shoulders, and as I moved to pry you off the smell of your breath, warm jagermeister and red bull, reminded me sharply of the sickly sweet scent of damp decay.  
Lacing your fingers through my hair, you plucked the cigarette from my lips and demanded a kiss.  
From a mouth stitched shut from the inside, moaning under your breath when smoke, ribboning and curling upwards like a thought, rushed from my mouth to yours with élan.  
“I will never understand you.”  
It wasn’t the truth.  
I understood why you would occasionally become upset at seeing your father’s features forming on your own face in the foggy vanity mirror.  
Why you would slam the bathroom door.  
And fuck someone six years younger.  
Or why you would exhale wispy smoke between our chests, and whisper that you love me, kiss me so hard we could both taste blood.  
It was all in an effort to heat up our barely beating hearts.  
“Let me buy you another drink.”  
  
_I made all the right noises_  
_and hardly hoped for a shiver as they poured from my lips and_  
 _passed right through you._  
 _We said all the right words._  
 _Ineffably whispered and heavy on our tongues like the taste of_  
 _three obols._  
 _And we choked on the silver_  
 _and drowned in the gold._  
  
“You’re gorgeous.” You said, or breathed, against the gaping holes where my eyes once were.  
Naked and disarmed, I could only shake my head and gasp in broken syllables when your tongue traced the freckles on my collarbone and your knees slipped on the sheets.  
I fancied myself a Proserpina.  
Lying face down in delicate ground hemlock and a tangle of bracken, the decaying brown fronds from the year before just visible under the green ones just unfurled.  
Repeated cries punctuated by the sticky sounds of muscle rent from the bone, I begged with rolling hips and words as bitter as blood for you to caress me. Cold carrion, sprawled limbs and vacated face.  
We were something like a sky burial in a roadside ditch.  
Mannequin bodies half-buried in the garbled vomit of a thousand passing cars.  
Our sometimes silent sometimes screaming sighs were an attempt to breathe life into intertwining bodies before before the sinews spoiled.  
Cracking bones, shuddering stomachs and blood beneath our fingernails reminded us  
that the human body is so easily damaged  
and discarded.  
  
_Ear pressed to my neck, you listened to my blood pulse and flap_  
_as it ran from my temple to my shoulders,_  
 _You smiled like a jackal,_  
 _wolf_  
 _like a stray dog,_  
 _canines against my shiver-rippled skin_  
 _and told me you loved the tangles in my mockingbird hair._  
 _When I put my palm near my mouth to see if I was still breathing,_  
 _you took my hands between your teeth and laughed when I asked if you remembered that_  
 _it's a sin to kill a mockingbird._  
  
I was the sound of your wet fingers on the rim of a glass of wine.  
Stick-slip, I was nothing but a shatter.  
“I don’t want this anymore.”  
You met my eyes over coffee and pointed with your cigarette, “What do you want, then?”  
I want you to be weak.  
I want you to be as weak as I am.  
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?”  
  
_Those burnholes in the mattress,_  
_left along with the kindness of a shared cigarette,_  
 _brought back dead-day memories of dust churning in sunlight,_  
 _of your fingers glued to my hair and of hazy blue-black bruises on hips._  
 _Of staring out your curtained window while the day lay dying and_  
 _the bones of tree branches, hanging with promise of upside-down leaves,_  
 _stretched across the sky_  
 _like summer dry lightning_  
 _like skeletal limbs._

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at:  
> http://sciencesaves.livejournal.com/33504.html


End file.
